~ Ion Pachia-Tatomirescu: „The Colour of the wind“

THE METAPHORS OF “THE MULTILAYERED REALITY” AND THE PARADOXIST RAINBOW WITHIN THE LOGOS

The figure ten seems to have always made reference to gold, to the golden decade (of the action), to the goldensection (in “architecture”), particularly to the mirific space of Dacia, inhabited by our ancestors who possessed the exquisite knowldge of becoming immortal, beginning, naturally, with the ten beams of the Andesite Sun in Kogaion (the Sacred Sarmizegetusa), up to the present-day children’s games, “playing the numbers”, games which mention – as Hegel himself remarked (in his famous philosophical lectures, when referring to the Dacians’ “first” Zalmoxis) – that after ten, you count again, “everything starting all over again”… Gold seems “to have striped” the innumerable vectorisations of the lyric-semantic-syncretic streaks to be found in Dimitrie Grama’s ten volumes of poetry published so far: The Being of the Word (Piatra Neamţ, Crigarux Publishing House – Orfica Series –, 2000), The Bird of Melancholy (Afterword: Interrogation and Initiation by Gheorghe A. M. Ciobanu –, Piatra Neamţ, Crigarux Publishing House – Orfica Series –, 2000), Shadow Hunt (Afterword: The Exile as the Restoration of Profundities by Cristian Livescu –, Piatra Neamţ, Crigarux Publishing House – Orfica Series –, 2001), The Elegies of Remoteness (Piatra Neamţ, Crigarux Publishing House – Vitralii Series –, 2001), The Metaphor Merchant (Piatra Neamţ, Crigarux Publishing House – Vitralii Series –, 2002), Souls Hanging on Masts (Piatra Neamţ, Crigarux Publishing House – Vitralii Series –, 2002), I Shall Clutch the Night Away – poems from Albion (Afterword: The Existential Infinite Between the Sky and the Earth by Gh. A. M. Ciobanu, Post-scriptum: “You have the great advantage of being impossible to be affiliated to any poetic aegis“by Ioan Grigorescu, Piatra Neamţ, Crigarux Publishing House – Vitralii Series –, 2003), Let’s Shake Hands, Stranger– 100 love poems and some further 100 (anthology, Preface: Self-Imposed Dumbness or the Irrepressible Need of Self-Utterance by Ioan Grigorescu, Piatra Neamţ, Crigarux Publishing House – Orfeu Series –, 2004), “Bastian” and Other Confidences – poems of the „mystical quotidian life” (“Pseudoafterword”: The Lens Polisher or “The Birth of a Book ” by Artur Silvestri, Bucureşti, Carpathia Press, 2005) and Common Obsessions (Afterword: On the Loneliness of the Sprinter… by Adrian Alui Gheorghe –, Iaşi, Timpul Publishing House, 2006). These ten volumes of poems perfectly propel the poet and cast his anchor in the golden vein of the well-tempered paradoxism. Firstly, this is due to the fact that, in spite of belonging to the Mediterranean-Danubian area of the “Southern” space, Dimitrie Grama writes a poetry marked by telluric-celestial thrill, under the metaphysical sun of the fjords, thus mirrored in the hoar frost of a hypercrystallised North, the poet mastering the wonderful art of looping spaciotemporality during the Aurora Borealis feast, the latter’s inner light being ever more intense and rigorous, with its globe of photons powerfully connected to both the core of the heart and the midnight, in a manner which brilliantly suits any genuine poet, trueborn not fabricated, needed (and not “expelled”) by the Wise City of “the Multilayered Reality”, a fortress which A. E. Baconsky approached the nearest in the 20th century; it is the City having a Ministry / Minister of the Holo-Metaphor in order to ensure “the dynamiting” and, subsequently, “the propulsion” of the knowledge horizon into the universe governed by the five fundamental elements – Water, Air, Fire, Wood, Earth –, under whose unmistakable seal we lead our life since the dawns of history, our entire ego being cosmically disseminated into a miraculous field of gravity, with its magnetic lines of force…

Secondly, the poet’s achievements in paradoxism are the result of the fact that, “upstream” his «manner of keeping himself at anchor in the Romanian language (his Motherland) and within a special emotional equation»1, the objective of Dimitrie Grama’s lyric poetry has been focused on the being of the Word / Logos or, more precisely, God’s Creation of Our Universe through the Word, as The Bible speaks in Genesis and in the Gospels, even if in apparently cryptic sentences: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God 2, or, supposedly, as far as the mythemes preserved in the folklore of the Arctic Circle peoples, especially of the Alaskan Eskimos: In the very earliest times, / that was the time when Words were like magic. / A word spoken by chance / might have strange consequences. / It would suddenly come alive / and what people wanted to happen could happen – / all you had to do was say it…3Dimitrie Grama investigates the mysterious space of the Logos with a view to “deify” poetry, the rainbow in the expressionist-paradoxist synesthesia: …particularly in the beginning… / On the other side / seemed / to grasp a new God. // He was also groping around the darkness; / through the cracks I sensed / a multitude of various hands, / groping around the darkness. / They had firm breasts and hot mouths / particularly in the beginning… // They said, “He’s here, he’s God, it’s marvellous !” («On the Other Side»). Furthermore, being tangential to “the deification of the Word”, ruling over the oxymoronic world, Dimitrie Grama takes the great step of the paradoxist essences in the poetic text, not only as “a multilayered reality”, (like in Bertolt Brecht’s The Mask of the Villain, or as in the meaning given by A. E. Baconsky to the above syntagma), but also as thesignifier generating the signified4, in accordance with the new aesthetics of the antiproletkultist generation of the poetic resurrection in Romania (1965 – 1970): It is undeniable… / Each / Crucifixion / Is an / Ascension / From the flesh / Into the clay… («Faith»).

(English version by Gabriela PACHIA)

Notes:

1„The Being…” by Emil Nicolae, review to the volume The Being of the Word by Dimitrie Grama, in the newspaper Acţiunea, no. 641, November 8, 2000, republished as “Critical References”, in the “Afterword” to the poet’s second volume, The Bird of Melancholy, p. 55 sq.

2The Gospel by John – The Embodiment of the Word, 1, 1.

3 «The story about the power of the Word in the beginnings» / «Magic Words», in Ion Pachia Tatomirescu, Istoria religiilor (The History of Religions), vol. I, Timişoara, Aethicus Publishing House, 2001, p. 126.

Mihai Eminescu: „The Dacian’s Prayer“

When death did not exist, not yet eternity,
Before the seed of life had first set living free,
When yesterday was nothing, and time had not begun,
And one included all things, and all was less than one,
When sun and moon and sky, the stars, the spinning earth
Were still part of the things that had not come to birth,
And You quite lonely stood... I ask myself with awe,
Who is this mighty God we bow ourselves before.

Ere yet Gods existed already He was God
And out of endless water with fire the lightning shed;
He gave the Gods their reason, and joy to earth did bring,
He brought to man forgiveness, and set salvation's spring.
Lift up your hearts in worship, a song of praise enfreeing,
He is the death of dying, the primal birth of being. >>>>>